Student Council Intranet

Jan. 1, 2010 - Aug. 1, 2012

## Web Development
db0 joined the student council a few months after starting her first year at the private university Epitech in Paris, determined to be the engine that moves and motivates the students of her year and drives change and innovation.
The lack of tools and rules to manage the team of student representatives leaded her to initiate the development of a simple website that would help other students follow the activities of the council. It was made using db0's web skill, which at that time were limited to **HTML** and **CSS**.
As this website started growing, the need for more features became obvious. It motivated db0 to extend her knowledge of web development, and that's how she learned the **PHP programming language**.
This intranet then became full-featured:
- **Authentication** of students and professors using the school's AFS Unix passwords (with log-as for administrators)
- **Meeting organizer and calendar**
- **Meeting reports**, including tracking of presence and export to formatted PDF automatically generated using **LaTeX**
- **Files manager** (including sub-directories, file types, thumbnails)
- **Ticketing system** (internal + external discussions with students and school administration, open/close, by year/city, emails and settings)
- **Tasks manager** with assignees and follow-up
- **Polls** manager with permissions, multi-update, various inputs (short text, paragraph, single choice, multiple choice, etc.), reports - ***very similar to Google Forms***
- Full-featured **Wiki** with history of changes, pages, links to pages, markup, contributors log
- Connection with **Twitter API** to allow any student representative to tweet through the intranet
- **Custom markup language** similar to BBCode with automatic converters to HTML, LaTeX and Markdown (used in tickets, meeting reports and wiki)
- **Mass emailing system** with customization of year/city/group or list of usernames
- **Statistics** of student representatives activities with points calculated to distribute final year rewards
- **Contact directory**
- **Passwords manager**
- **Permission levels** depending on status and experience of the student representative
- Automatic **ban** of abusive users
- Automatic **update of the database** from the school's AFS
The entire development of this intranet was done entirely by db0 and took months of development in synchronisation with her studies. It was a 100% volunteered job, but she saw it as an opportunity to showcase her skills and therefore extend her network.
On her 2nd year, more students joined the school and were impressed by the work done on the intranet and were willing to get an equivalent. db0 then extended it to make it work seamlessly with different school years and different cities, since the university had multiple sites nationwide.
## Management
Of course, developing an intranet wasn't the only task of the student council president, and db0 learned a lot of valuable professional skills thanks to this experience.
- **Management** of a team of 8 student representatives and synchronisation with the other school years representatives
- Organization of **large-scale events**, logistic, booking of professional services
- Annual conference to present the student council to the new students
- Annual final conference to summurize the year and discuss feedback
- Students, professors and labs official photographies
- **Negotiations** with the school administration for funding and changes
- **2 weekly meetings**: with the team and with the administration
- **Elections** twice a year of new student representatives (with online votes and real life ballots)
- Handle feedback and troubleshooting of students studying at **international universities**
- Design of a **visual identity** for the team, order t-shirts